I haven’t commented much about the NFL this year. Too much else going on, and I had honestly decided last year to let go of my final long-frustrated desire to see the Dallas Cowboys do well once again. And for the most part, I’ve done that this year. I commented briefly back in the first quarter of the season about how Tom Brady was being called “old” and “washed up” after a bad early game, and, of course, he’s now squarely in the middle of the MVP talk, an MVP he deserves in my opinion.

But someone else probably deserves that MVP too, but he’ll never get a mention, in fact he will probably be behind his own teammate in the final MVP analysis. Of course I’m talking about Tony Romo. The same Tony Romo who shattered my hopes last year, of course. I swore then I’d never defend him again. And yet here I am. I am quite frankly stunned by today’s results. I was taking my dog for a long walk when the game began, deliberately, and I was spinning scenarios in my head of how the Cowboys might possibly go toe-to-toe with Andrew Luck and the Colts. By the time I returned from my walk, the Cowboys were up 28-0 and continued to pour it on after that. Tony Romo completed a Cowboys franchise record 90% of his passes (18/20) including four touchdowns with no interceptions. Those are remarkably Aikman-like numbers. Both in quality and quantity. While everyone, including Jason Garrett and the Cowboys coaching staff, rightly call the Cowboys a “run-first” team, Tony Romo has completed 10 touchdowns with no interceptions in the last three games. The most-maligned December quarterback I can think of has performed so well in three games this December that he has risen to the #1 spot in accuracy, yards per attempt and QB rating. Yes, I said QB rating, which Aaron Rodgers owned a more than 10 point lead just a month ago.

And Romo has done all this with broken vertebrae in his back, torn cartilage in his rib cage and back surgery less than a year ago. The list and severity of injuries Romo has played through has become so long that it has almost become unnoticed.

I still don’t believe in the Cowboys though. I want to. Maybe I even should. But just winning the NFC East isn’t enough to convince me these Cowboys are for real. I need to see them beat Green Bay in a playoff game, or even Seattle, before I really will accept that they’ve become a legitimate contender.

But at least for today, I have to acknowledge what the Cowboys accomplished to get to this point, with one game left to go. I think how they do next week, in what will likely be a meaningless game against a team in chaos with nothing but pride on the line, will tell me a lot about their real toughness.

Yep, my year plus drama at work with layoff, no layoff, new layoff, no layoff, etc. has finally officially ended for good. Today I sent in the papers that officially ended my tenure at the multi-national financial services company I have worked at for seven plus years. I’ll get seven months severance (not in one lump, it will be paid out as a continuation of my paycheck for seven months or until I get a new job, whichever comes first) to live on while I figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

And, of course, what I WANT to do is be a writer. So it’s time to start getting really serious about that.

This week I’ve seen three separate stories about three different fusion “breakthroughs”. This story is about an announcement from Lockheed’s “Skunkworks” experimental development team. Luckily it includes a cool technical looking photo that probably has nothing to do with the actual fusion reactor, but it looks great.

If this story, or one of the others I’ve seen, pans out, this could be the biggest thing that has happened to the human race since the industrial revolution. Maybe even bigger.

Last season was the worst season Tom Brady has had. During the season I considered his poor stats to be due to losing all of his key receivers and having to re-establish the timing and coordination with new receivers. Plus I pointed out that in spite of his supposedly terrible year, the Patriots very nearly had home field advantage throughout the playoffs and made it to the AFC Championship game before losing to the supposedly unbeatable Denver Broncos. In fact I thought that the perseverance and determination shown by the Patriots in spite of adversity was a testament to Brady’s character and leadership.

This year though it’s harder to make that argument. Brady has just been bad. I listened to the first half of last night’s MNF game and it was so painful that I just turned it off.

Today all I see on sports websites is that Brady is finished. Kaput. A first ballot HoF lock who has lost his skills and needs to hang up his cleats.

I find hard to believe that he could fall so far, so fast though. I’m not quite ready to write him off. We’ll see how the rest of the season goes. The Patriots are lucky that their division is one that nobody is running away with, so they still have a shot to win the division if they can right their tilting ship.

Still, not as bad as I feared. But it is painful. I have to clean my nose out with hydrogen peroxide, saline solution and some special salve three times a day, and that ain’t fun.

They gave me 12 days worth of percocet, so they’re expecting it to take a while to heal I suppose. Hope it’s not hurting that long. Still swollen from the surgery so not much to report on the improvement side. But keeping fingers crossed.

My first follow-up is Tuesday. That’s when my surgeon takes out some or all of the stents that are holding my nose together.

I have suffered throughout my life with serious breathing issues in my nose. As I have gotten older, the problems have increased to the point that breathing through my left nostril usually requires pulling the skin on my face to open the passage up. My right nostril isn’t much better.

There are three reasons for this, according to my ear/nose/throat doctor/surgeon. They are:

As a child playing Little League baseball I went down to field a hard low line drive, but the ball hit a mostly buried beer bottle and bounced directly up into my face, shattering my nose and knocking me unconscious. I woke up in the hospital. Apparently the long-term consequence of this poor fielding experience is a 100% deviated septum. In other words, the septum is completely canted over into my left nostril, accounting for most of the problems I have breathing through that orifice.

The nasal passages have a lot of tissue inside them. The purpose of most of that tissue is to moisturize the air as you breathe in, catch particulates, viruses and bacteria before they get into your lungs, and to help capture some of the warmth of your breath as you breathe out. Apparently my nose has run rampant with some of those tissues, and they have become too big, which blocks off the airflow and actually reduces their effectiveness as filters.

My nose appears to be the world’s most popular haven for nasal polyps. My surgeon described my polyp situation as “11 out of 10”. Nasal polyps are mostly benign (but I will be getting biopsies on them just in case) but they can swell and shut off air flow, and at the very least they are like mucous sponges that lead to a never ending nasal drip that seems to be contributing to swallowing issues.

Anyway, while techniques have improved greatly over the past several decades since my doctors first recommended major nasal surgery, it is still true that such surgery is operating in dangerous proximity to the brain. Infections from this sort of surgery have proven to be fatal. So there is some measurable risk here.

But still, I have become desperate enough to schedule the surgery, and have begun taking the medicine needed to prep for the surgery. Wish me luck.

Yesterday the Cosmic Wife and I decided to do something we haven’t done in a long time, probably years. We went on a ten-mile day hike through some of the most rugged Rocky Mountain back-country areas near Denver.

Specifically, we went to the Mt. Evans Wilderness Area and hiked in to the “Chicago Lakes”, two true mountain lakes located where several mountain peaks come together creating a classic Rocky Mountain valley with multiple lakes full of wildlife, flowers and, of course, trout.

(Not my photo, I do have some photos, but they are on my camera and I haven’t uploaded them to my laptop yet.)

Anyway, as I said, it’s been a while since we did such a strenuous hike. And we learned a few things:

Our old boots are in need of replacement. We wore the same boots we purchased probably ten years ago. Turns out that my feet must have gotten larger somehow, because the same boots that I’ve hiked probably hundreds of miles in, no longer truly fit my feet. By the end of the hike my toes were feeling pretty crushed. I wonder if that’s because I’ve been wearing round-toed boots and my toes have spread out a bit since we used to hike frequently. Regardless, I need new boots if we’re going to do ten-mile day hikes regularly.

Our backpacks are crappy. Which, again, is weird because they are the same backpacks we’ve used for years. I guess we just didn’t care as much about comfort back then, but on this hike it was clear that our backpacks needed to be upgraded. We probably just picked these up at WalMart, and they are bargain-basement day hike backpacks. Mostly they are nylon bags with zippers and straps sewn onto them. I think we need some actual well-designed and well-constructed day hike backpacks. It looks like a decent day hike backpack costs about $50 minimum, and up to $200 for the “serious” models. I may take a trip to REI or some other outdoor store today to look at some.

We need to pack more intelligently. I have a tendency to throw a bunch of stuff in my backpack, where it all just sort of meanders around resulting in hard corners poking out here, there and everywhere, which causes me to have to reach back and try to adjust things as we’re walking. We bring too many snacks I think, and too much other stuff. For example, our sunscreen was a big metal can of sunscreen, when a tiny little tube of the stuff would likely have been much lighter and more convenient.

We may need some walking sticks. When you are in your second straight hour of plodding along scree-filled trails that force you to step from rock to rock, it is easy to stub a toe and trip. And falling with a backpack on is no fun. I used to have a nice walking stick, but it broke years ago and I haven’t replaced it. Maybe we should get the ski-pole type of walking stick.

Finally there’s the “cooler” question. Some day packs have a section that is insulated and allows you to keep something cold, or at least cool. Up until now I’ve always considered those to be overkill. But a nice cool drink with lunch isn’t a bad idea either. So I’m wondering what the best way to pack something cold would be.

Anyway, I don’t know if or when we’ll tackle a similar hike again. But I enjoy long mountain hikes. Sure there are times when you are plodding up a miserable, never-ending uphill section where you start to wonder what you are doing, but the end result is almost always worth the effort. It certainly was yesterday.